The Blue (The Complete Novel) (27 page)

This time I don’t stop and stare at the waterspouts. They are too big for my imagination to contend with, and much too close. And the chaos around me seems too unreal, so I focus on the clear sheets of water rolling across the deck, watching them roll through so they don’t sweep me up and throw me over the gunwales. I reach one of the deck pillars and grab on just in time before the ship tests me. I wait and look out from my planted feet at the wheelhouse. The last guy’s still in there, focused ahead on the twisting horizon. He’s trying to keep us afloat as hard as he can.
John
—the name his crew had used. Trying to keep the three of us alive. But he must not know where the hell he is. That there’s no trying that will work in Waterspout Alley.

By the time I make another twenty feet along the deck, I’m almost at the side of the wheelhouse. I grab on again to the rail and look down at the churning monster of brown sea that’s beating us sideways. I watch the spray rise up and then suck away, like there’s a great suction below that’s pulling everything with it down to the lost cities a mile below. And the wind blows so hard that I almost lose the gun. I tuck it right up under my armpit and secure it with both hands. Nothing but screaming sounds fill my head—high-pitched shrieks of the lashing wind that try to torque me up over the railing. And I time the calm bit of the swell perfectly, because there’s no other way to get closer. I make it around to the back of the wheelhouse and stand right behind the guy, watching his soaked body work over the tiny metal wheel, his long dark hair soggy in clumped strands that whip out as the wind blows in through the rear door. And then I look past him, through the glass window, and out at the sky. And I realize he’s not fighting to move the ship out of the storm anymore, he’s just trying to keep it in place, in one piece. I almost want to leave him without a word, to let him keep fighting through the storm, because he’s doing a better job than I could ever do. But the urge to kill him gets the better of me and I move in closer. Still, right behind him, he doesn’t even know I’m there. There’s no way to hear my movements against the chaos, and he’s glued to the mountains of water that drive us up and down. And just as I raise the gun, ready to shoot him, it becomes clear to me. He really is our only hope. So just that quickly, I back up and slip out of the wheelhouse. I use the rails at intervals to make my way back to the hatch unseen, following the raised portions of the deck where he won’t see me. And then, after the feeling of sickness develops in me so much that I feel like I just need to lay down, I descend back down into the darkness. The flashlight comes out and I find my way across the room to Voley, first checking to see that each and every one of the men really are dead. The light climbs over their bodies, shining back and forth until I’m convinced that no breath is coming from any of their mouths. And then, reaching Voley, I hook my arm around the bar and my other arm slides between the metal to touch him. It’s okay boy, we’ll get through this. And I keep telling him that, even though I know it all depends on someone else now, someone I have to kill but can’t yet. And for now, he’s our best shot. I explain it all to Voley, and I tell him I’ll get him out of there soon, as soon as I find the right key. And then, I draw my hand back out through the bars and place the flashlight between my legs and shut it off. Each time the ship rolls hard, I squeeze tightly against the bar and stay in place, but Voley slips away, slamming into the hull. Finally I stick my hand back in and loop my fingers around his collar. He whines in pain when the ship spills down into the troughs, but I tell myself it’s less pain for him than smashing into the wall each time. And then, when we’ve settled into the routine of the bashing, I watch the stairs through a haze of nausea. For any sign of someone coming down. I can’t help but throw up  on the floor, but I keep my eyes planted. Watching and waiting. Even though something tells me he won’t leave the wheel until we’re through this or we go down. And then it comes into my head—
you’ll get through this.
It flies against everything my gut has evidence for: that we’re in Waterspout Alley now; that there’s no going back; that the ship’s deep into Kansas and the waterspouts are only the beginning of the torrent. I fight between the two thoughts, and part of me tries to push me to my feet to go see the horizon, to see if there’s been any change in the weather. But I know there hasn’t, because the sounds are the same.

It feels like forever until something changes with the storm. It’s a sheet of water that rips down the stairs and spreads over my legs and rolls into Voley’s cell. Then, when the ship twists again, it slides to the other side of the cabin. But in another minute, the same thing happens again, and the water gets a little higher. I finally tell Voley I have to seal the door, and I leave him to walk through the tiny rushing waves of sea. When I get to the hatch, I can’t help but poke up and look. The sky looks just as dark as ever, but the first thing I notice is the waterspouts. They’re smaller instead of bigger. I have to check two times to believe it, and then, even as the next wash of sea is set to drop down onto me, I stand up high enough to glimpse the wheelhouse. And there’s the man—John—still working on the wheel, trying to desperately to keep the ship afloat. I shut the hatch and go back down into the darkness—now nearly completely black because the lamp’s gone out—with some kind of raw hope that we’re moving away from the center of this beast, and that the sea will level out somehow. And I find Voley and the bars and lock myself in again, holding onto his collar, and we wait.

Chapter 27

The rage of the weather starts to finally die down and the swells seem to be leveling off. I think I hear the rain returning to a gentler patter above our heads, and Voley has fallen asleep. It gives me enough courage to let go of the bars and snake my way through the dark toward the steps. I pause at the first one, waiting for the sound of feet, as if John will hear me as soon as I get to the hatch, because he’s waiting for me there above the door. Trapping me in. But there’s no sound, and armed with the gun, I push up and feel the chill of a strong gust. The first thing I notice is the sky—it’s no longer blacked out like before, but a deep rolling gray. I see strands powering through the sky, moving with tremendous speed, but nowhere near as imposing as the great black monster of before. The rain splashes on the stairs but there’s no more sea spilling in from the deck. Each rock and rise kicks up a little spray that I see over the far gunwale, and then I stick out enough to see the wheelhouse. No one’s there. I swing my head around, turning in every direction but behind the door, and he’s nowhere. Immediately I want to duck back down and hide again, because I think he must have seen the door rise and hid somewhere. And then, when I look back after scanning everywhere I can, he’s back. Right there in the wheelhouse again. Like I didn’t see him before. And it looks like he’s passed out in a chair, his head pressed against the wall. With one more look down at Voley, and a whisper that I’ll be back, I shoot out into the driving rain.

The sound of water hitting plastic fills my ears as the rain ricochets off of the rain suit, and I follow the rail all the way around to the back of the wheelhouse. I keep my gun high, exposed to the water, and hope the thing won’t jam up. And when I make it there, all the way to the wheelhouse door, I see his face. The one that stared down at me from the bow and sent the other one down after me. He looks young to be their leader, but then I see the gray mop under his hood, and I realize he’s older than I think. His face just looks young, like he hasn’t been out in the rain as much the others. I wonder for a moment if he’s lived indoors somewhere, maybe for all of his life, and that’s why he’s been preserved. But it can’t be. He’s their captain. And now, finally, because they’ve drifted the wrong way, the rain is winning. I wonder if he has any idea what’s happened to the rest of his crew. That they’re all dead. That he’s alone. But I know—he hasn’t had time to think about it—to figure out why his crew has abandoned him at the wheel. All he must know is he sent for them to get the psycho back—the one with his mind on me. When I wake him up, poking him with the barrel of my gun, he acts completely surprised, and the first thing he asks me is where they are. I tell him without hesitation: They’re dead.

It takes a moment for the truth to sink in. He asks again, like he didn’t believe me, but I repeat myself: all of them are dead, below the deck. His eyes go off, roaming over the sky and then the ship, the slick shine of the water and the pelting rain, like he can find the truth by looking. And when he’s satisfied there’s nothing to be learned from inside the wheelhouse, the realization sliding over his face that I’m not lying, he starts to get up. I tell him to freeze.

            “Move again and you’re with them,” I say. He pauses and sits back down, studying me.

            “Jesus Christ, how old are you?” he says, like he doesn’t already know—like that wasn’t part of the draw behind picking me up and locking me in a cell. I ignore him and keep the gun on his chest, and then I ask him where we are. He says he doesn’t know. Where’d you come from, then? I fire back. And he gives me a story about coming down from Canada—straight through the Dakotas and Nebraska. I tell him that’s bullshit, that he can’t have come that far, and to tell me the truth. But he doesn’t change the story. He says they escaped and never looked back. And then he knows he’s slipped and I look him in his eyes but he turns away. Escaped what? I ask him. He doesn’t answer, just looks out over the water at the humps of sea and the rolling gray clouds. A wall of spray crashes down on the fore deck after flying high over the bow. He jerks a little bit too much with the hit, like he’s pretending the wave’s moved him more than it has.

            “Do it again and it’s your leg,” I tell him. But he just looks at me and smiles, like something has come over him, and he’s at peace all of the sudden—like he has no fear of me.

            “Look,” he tells me, “You’ve got to believe me—we weren’t going to hurt you.” And I can’t help it—the rage fires within me and I aim down and shoot a round into his leg. He screams and the thunder roars back at him, and suddenly his personality changes. He tells me that I’m a little bitch, and that he’s going to fucking kill me. But then he calms himself down quickly and looks at me, trying to figure out how he can do it. I see it in his eyes so I back off a step and quickly glance around the cabin to make sure there’s not another gun in here. Then I see it—one of the machine guns—identical to mine, just a few feet away against the opposite wall.

            “Do it and you’re dead,” I warn him. “Just like your friends. Where did you really escape from?” I ask again. He tells me a story about some prison they were in. Some high plateau up and out of the rain sea way up in Brandon, Manitoba. And it’s a man-made plateau, something real big, he says. But they got loose up there, and were heading down south on account of the stories about the weather down in Mexico.

            “What did you hear about Mexico?” I ask him, the gun still on his chest.

            “Just what I said—that it’s not raining there. And there’s land without even mud. And that’s all we’re doing. Picked you up and put you down there only because you can’t trust anyone out here anymore. And then the storm hit. We were going to let you out.”

            When he says it—the reason he picked me up—I want to smack the barrel of the gun across his face, rake the metal in nice and deep over his skin. But I don’t, because I’d have to step too close to do it.

            “You’re trying to tell me they have law up there?” I say. “Bullshit.”

            “Not law. Just a bunch of people who think they’re law. But there’s no controlling anyone now. It’s everyone for themselves. You know that’s how it is.”

            I ask him where the keys are to the cell that Voley’s in. He says he doesn’t know, and that he can check for me if I want. I tell him not a chance, and that he better remember real fast. When he stalls, his eyes roaming around the cabin, and finally settling on the gun, eyeing it up again, trying to silently judge how long it would take him to leap for it and turn around and fire at me, I tell him he’s got three seconds to remember, or it’s the other leg.

            “You know you’re real pretty. Too pretty to be this mean,” he says, a new smile lighting up across his face. “How did a girl like you get to be out here, in the sea all alone?” I know he’s stalling for time, thinking through his attack, trying to get me to put my guard down for just a second. I’ve been taught all these things too well by Russell though. I know exactly what this man is going to do before he even does it, and I anticipate every word out of his mouth. I want to blow him away right now, but the fear that I can’t keep the ship afloat on my own spikes through me. That I’ll somehow get it sideways and we’ll go down. And what I need to do is get him to guide it back to Colorado, all the way to Pikes Peak. And then it rings through my head—the radio. I ask him what he did with my gear. He tells me it’s all stored under the fore deck hatch.

            “I’ll show you if you want,” he tells me, no longer looking around the cabin and putting his eyes back on me. I don’t say a word, I just watch him, rubbing the trigger with my finger. My skin runs over the smooth metal and the urge to push in almost overwhelms me. I’ll find it myself, I tell him. And then, I ask how much gas this thing has left.

            “Enough gas to get to Mexico,” he tells me. I ask him how he knows that if he doesn’t know where the hell we are.

            “You’ve just got to calm down some,” he goes on. “We’re not going to get there working together like this.” And then, he asks me again if they’re all really dead.

            “Where are the keys?” I ask. He gives me the same empty answer. I tell him he’s got one minute left to remember. There’s no other option left, I tell him. And then, with a bold laugh, he asks me what I plan to do all alone out on the ocean by myself.